Month: August 2015

Cleaning a restroom is always important to me. If there’s any place on my route that’s more critiqued and scrutinized for whether I’m actually good at my job, it’s the restroom.
And really, it should be.

Among the many necessities of our species and in order to maintain good health and well being, the function of eliminating waste is pretty close to the top of the list, in my opinion. Food and water, the intake of sustenance, of course, but right after that would be, “Okay, now what do we do with the leftovers?” (No pun intended.)
The Restroom is one place that supply’s that need. Or maybe, we supply the restroom’s needs. Nevermind; that thought will take us in another direction.

It is a private place to do private things, how ever you may define “private“.
And when those private things need to be taken care of, we feel more comfortable doing those things in a safe, clean environment.

That’s where I come in. Literally.

Things may get messy, that’s the nature of things (again, no pun intended). Things may even get outright gross. But the great thing about a restroom is that we can leave it there, and just walk away.

In our relationships, we need a place that’s safe and clean to take care of things that are totally natural, but unfortunately pretty messy. For instance, mistakes, big or small, can cause tremendous havoc on one’s spirit and on their environment. As learning, sentient beings, mistakes are a natural occurrence; it has the potential to grow and expand our life if we allow it. But having a safe, clean place to experience that mistake ups the chances of that mistake becoming a positive influence on our life’s journey rather than something that will stop us and slowly tumble us backwards, rolling destructively down the hillside of our failed attempts.

And mistakes hurt; that’s a given truth. If they didn’t, we would have continued on blissfully and obliviously to our demise.

If you’ve been hurt by another’s mistake, and your relationship to them is cordially platonic, you may find that after the initial hurt, there’s very little reason to dwell on the subject. Because sometimes if you do, your imagination mixed with your unattended hurt feelings will fill in the blanks of missing information and cause you to stew and steam over something that really doesn’t exist. And as we say in the Janitorial business, that’ll get messy.

However, if you’ve been affected by the mistake of one you love and care for and desire in your life, then after you realize that your hurt, which was expected, is subsiding, you must make your love for that other person a safe, clean environment where they can learn and understand the ramifications of their mistake, but also so that they can be pointed toward a point of healing, not hopelessness.

An act of redemption like that will cause atonement like none other because it is based on unconditional Love.

Of course, if they just want to take a toilet paper roll, stuff it down the toilet and flush it causing an epic overflow draining through the roof of Michiko’s Nail and Beauty Spa downstairs, well, it’ll have to be cleaned up and everything made clean and safe again for the next visitor.

It’s amazing what people throw away- empty cups, burger wrappers, Styrofoam peanuts -all kinds of stuff. The thing that hit me as I was dumping out some trash this morning at work is that at some point we needed these! They were a necessary part of the ultimate fulfillment of an essential want had in our lives. But, as I noticed this morning, our commitment to these extraneous elements is temporary, and extremely fleeting at that.
Perhaps this is why we chose to put them under a label and categorize them as “Disposable” in an effort to alleviate our guilt or responsibility to their future. If we see the word “Disposable” literally or in our minds, we are quite fine with saying, “Well, that’s what I’m supposed to do with it. I mean, that’s what Disposable means, right?”

Actually, it isn’t.

The “Disposable” moniker means that you can throw it away; not that you should or you must or even that it is illegal or even hazardous to you if you don’t. It simply means you can, if you chose to do so, dispose of that item with little or no consequence to you personally.